I am hoping each of you will select the top-10 blogs based on quality, longevity and frequency. (I personally find length of the article irrelevant, content is King!) I did want to list my top 10 articles over the last 12 months:

1. The vSphere 5.0 – HA Deepdive
2. Using vSphere Auto-Deploy in your home lab
3. Multiple-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5…
4. esxtop
5. vSphere 5.0: Storage vMotion and the Mirror Driver
6. vSphere 5.0: What has changed for VMFS?
7. HA Architecture Series (1 – 5)
8. “Hacking” Site Recovery Manager (SRM) / a Storage Array Adapter
9. ESXi 5.0 and Scripted Installs
10. vSphere 5.0 vMotion Enhancements

The voting is very straight forward and will only take 2 minutes of your time, all you have to do is select your Top 10 favourite VMware related virtualization blog sites and then sort them in your order of preference (ie: 1 – 10) – it’s as easy as that! Don’t wait any longer, cast your vote now!

• Greg Hetrick - comment 30876
• Kalle Lund – comment 30929
• Fernando - comment 31170
• Adam Eckerle - comment 31230

Each of you will receive an email from me shortly asking for your address. I will still need to get Frank to sign them but promise I will ship them asap!

Once again, thanks everyone for the kind word! Much appreciated and keep coming back and don’t forget to comment. Bloggers love feedback / interaction!

BizTech’s Must-Read IT Blogs

So now here is your chance to be part of this great session!  Do you have a question that you’d like the experts to answer? Simply fill out the form below and your question will be added to the queue! We expect you will have great questions during the session but just in case the room goes silent we would like to have a couple of questions to get us started… although I don’t doubt for a second that during the introduction Chad aka “Chat” Sakac will get started right away

See you in Vegas, make sure to attend this session as panel sessions like these don’t happen often!

• VMware ESXi: Planning, implementation and security
  The week before VMware Partner Exchange I decided that it was time to start brushing up my ESXi knowledge. I usually dig up all the manuals and presentations I can find and start from there. This time I took a different approach however, I bought a book. The book is titled “VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security” and is authored by a true VMTN Community hero, Dave Mishchenko.
• Scripted install with ESXi
  Now you can kick off the automated install of your ESXi server. But wait, you probably want to see what script I used? That is what I figured, here is the script I wrote to automatically install and configure the ESXi host, it is just a simple script that I used and tested in my lab with the main purpose of showing what is possible with ESXi today. The configuration of the server will run after the first boot. I have added several “comment lines” to explain what I am doing and why.
• Adopting ESXi, now is the time!
  Within the virtualization community we have been seeing more and more people adopting ESXi. Not only adopting it but also actively evangelizing the use of ESXi over ESX classic. The main argument being of course the reduction in operational effort involved with maintaining the platform. Last week two excellent articles were published. The first article was by Bob Plankers of LoneSysAdmin.net fame. Bob wrote an excellent article countering all often heard complaints about ESXi.

I also wrote my first KB article which discusses the impact of CPU/Memory limits with help from someone from the the GSS team. You would expect that a KB article describing the impact already existed but surprisingly enough it did not. Hence the reason I felt an official statement could prevent some of the issues we see in the field on a daily basis.

• Impact of virtual machine memory and CPU resource limits

Of course that’s not it, I am working on multiple other projects which I cannot discuss yet unfortunately and participated in the VCDX Defenses at PEX. One of the things I can reveal though is that Frank and I are make plans for a volume 2 of the HA/DRS Tech Deepdive and that the sales is still going strong, thanks everyone for your help/support! (No, there will not be an e-book unfortunately, the amount of time/reformatting required did not fit our current schedule.) Keep those reviews and pictures coming though.

While I have enjoyed working within the PSO/TS organization, I have always been tempted to be part of an R&D organization to get as close to the source as possible, and of course to be able to influence the products, features and the direction of those. I never expected it to happen this soon though but the opportunity presented itself and as you can imagine I grabbed it with both hands. Joining Technical Marketing means that I will be able to focus more on educating people through white-papers, books, documentation and yellow-bricks.com. On top of that the promotion to Principal is a huge recognition; to be amongst the ranks of Pang Chen, Lee Dilworth, John Arrasjid, Dan Anderson and others is a true honor.

I want to thank everyone who made this possible, you know who you are! I cannot wait to get started,

Duncan

Hope you like it, and of course a Happy New Year!

While many posts from previous years have proven to be evergreen, and among the most heavily trafficked, these are the top posts on Yellow-Bricks published in 2010:

1. ESXTOP
2. VMotion, the story and confessions
3. What’s the point of setting “-iops=1″
4. VMware vCloud Director
5. Storage I/O Fairness
6. vCD Networking – Intro – Part 1
7. The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox
8. Limiting your vCPU
9. Aligning your VMs virtual harddisks
10. SIOC, tying up some lose ends

My personal favorites:

1. VMotion, the story and confessions
   I guess I love this one as it isn’t really a tech deepdive but more about how VMware, and in specific Mike Nelson, changed my world and those of many others… Especially the comments make this article a great read!
2. Re: Maximum Hosts Per Cluster
   This is what I love about blogging, responding to others, voicing your opinion, sharing thoughts / knowledge / expertise… that is what it is all about in my opinion.
3. ESXTOP
   I love esxtop, there is so much info to be found in esxtop that I never knew where to start. I started documenting some thresholds and by the looks of the stats on this page I wasn’t the only one who needed some guidelines. This page is getting more hits daily than my HA deepdive…

I want to thank everyone for reading yellow-bricks.com and I want to wish all of you a great 2011. See you next year,

As of today “vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive” is available on paper via CreateSpace and Amazon. We are also working on getting a digital copy up for sale but that will more than likely be early 2011.

There is something I want to make very clear here as I have heard multiple people referring to this book as “Duncan’s Book”. This book was very much a joint effort. Frank has invested at least as much time in this project as I have, and probably even more. I want to thank Frank for his hard work and hope everyone realizes that it is our book and not my book!

We want to take the opportunity to thank our Technical Reviewers for their very valuable feedback and for keeping us honest; fellow VCDX Panel Member Craig Risinger (VMware PSO), Marc Sevigny (VMware HA Engineering), Anne Holler (VMware DRS Engineering) and Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nl). A very special thanks to Scott Herold for writing the foreword!

For those who can’t wait, order it via CreateSpace or Amazon now. (Please be so kind to leave a review

This is the description of the book that is up on CreateSpace/Amazon:

About the authors:
Duncan Epping (VCDX 007) is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Cloud Practice. Duncan works primarily with Service Providers and large Enterprise customers. He is focussed on designing Public Cloud Infrastructures and specializes in bc-dr, vCloud Director and VMware HA. Duncan is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com, the leading VMware blog.
Frank Denneman (VCDX 029) is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Professional Services Organization. Frank works primarily with large Enterprise customers and Service Providers. He specializes in Resource Management, DRS and storage. Frank is the owner of frankdenneman.nl which has recently been voted number 6 worldwide on vsphere-land.com

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.
Coverage includes:

• HA node types
• HA isolation detection and response
• HA admission control
• VM Monitoring
• HA and DRS integration
• DRS imbalance algorithm
• Resource Pools
• Impact of reservations and limits
• CPU Resource Scheduling
• Memory Scheduler
• DPM

We hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we did writing it. Thanks,

Chethan is a Senior Member of the Performance Engineering team  At VMware. He focuses on characterizing / troubleshooting performance of Enterprise Applications (mostly databases) in virtual environments using VMware products. Chethan has also studied the performance characteristic of the VMware storage stack and was one of the people who produced this great whitepaper on Storage I/O Control. Chethan just released his first article and I am sure many excellent articles will follow. Make sure you add him to your bookmarks/rss reader.

Running Virtual Center Database in a Virtual Machine

I just completed an interesting project. For years, we at VMware believed that SQL server databases run well when virtualized. We have illustrated this through several benchmark studies published as white papers. It was time for us to look at real applications. One such application that can be found in most of the vSphere based virtual environments is the database component of the vCenter server (the brain behind a vSphere environment). Using the vCenter database as the application and the resource intensive tasks of the vCenter databases (implemented as stored procedures in SQL server-based databases) as the load generator, I compared the performance of these resource intensive tasks in a virtual machine (in a vSphere 4.1 host) to that in a native server.